Chuck Colby

Colby WalkMac (The First Mac Laptop)

This is the famous Colby WalkMac that was on the
cover of all the magazines. Customers ranged from the Grateful Dead
rock band to Peter Jennings of CBS news. It was the first battery powered
Mac and the first portable Mac with an LCD display. Many thousands of
these were sold from1987 to1991, and before Apple came out with their
portable, when anyone called Apple in search of a portable Mac, Apple
gave them Colby's Phone number. Even when Apple came out with their
portable, the WalkMac SE 30 continued to sell well because the first
Apple Portable was way underpowered compared to the WalkMac SE30, which
was based on the Mac SE 30 motherboard. The name was later changed to
Colby SE30 after Sony threatened to sue over the name WalkMac because
they said it was too close to Walkman.

The Colby WalkMac was the first battery powered
laptop MacIntosh. It was first introduced in 1986 and then later upgraded
to the WalkMac SE30 when the Mac Se30 came out.

Wooden mockup of the canonical modern laptop (circa
1982) open and folding shut

This prototype WalkMac was all aluminum construction
and was the first portable computer that had a removable back-light
for the LCD display.(1986) By unplugging the back-light unit, you could
set the display on an overhead projector and project the screen image
onto a large screen. This was later patented (wrongly) by someone from
Taiwan.